A Drive in the Western Pawnee

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We took a drive yesterday around the western part of the Pawnee National Grasslands. It was a beautiful Spring day on the prairie: sunny, warm and breezy. It's a wondrous part of the world in any season, but our favorite time to visit is in mid-to-late June, when flowers are blooming, bugs and birds are plentiful, and everything seems especially vibrant, active and alive. We were a little early for many of the flowers in the part of the grasslands we drove through, but the prickly pear blooms were in their prime, most of the grasses were flowering, and wildlife was busy, busy busy everywhere. It was a gorgeous day, we saw few other people on our travels, and we had a great time.

enjoying the perfect day

We wandered around with no particular destination in mind, stopping to hike around a bit and take pictures whenever something caught our eye. Here are a few that illustrate the beauty of the Pawnee in all its mid-June glory.

I'll start with a few pictures of the many grasses we saw, after all, it is a National Grassland...

most of the grasses are in bloom

a close up of one of the grasses, showing how the seed heads are connected to the main stalks

a wide variety of grasses and ground cover

what a beautiful plant!

upon closer examination of this picture at a high resolution, I discovered a small worm and some eggs neatly laid along a small branch in the area enclosed in the orange circle

here they are, the worm (transparent) is on the left of the branch, the eggs to the right...did the worm lay the eggs?

Here is a piece of antique farm equipment parked on the side of one of the roads we wandered along. No idea what it was used for, but it sure is an interesting piece of the past

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Everywhere we went we saw lots of birds. Morning doves, lark bunting, meadowlarks, starlings, curlews, hawks, falcons: plenty of the birds we could identify, and plenty we couldn't. We had the good fortune to see not one, but 2 owls on our drive. The first one was perched on a fence post running out from a cattle guard, and both of us noticed the owl and had the thought that it was a strange silhouette--what kind of bird is that? A few feet past the guard it struck Joe that it sure looked like an owl, so we backed up for a closer look. Sure enough, he was right. We took a picture from the car, here is the grainy enlargement I was able to pull from it, still clear enough to confirm Joe's ID:

this is a burrowing owl, looked it up when we got home

The owl appeared to be sleeping, but snapped to attention as we backed up, eying us warily and swiveling its head 180 degrees to take a look at us with each eye. We took a couple of pictures and grabbed the binoculars for closer inspection. After awhile we started wondering if it would be possible to get a closer picture, so I eased out of the car and very slowly walked behind the car which offered a much better vantage. Well, as I was easing and walking, the owl turned into the wind and took off--what a magnificent sight it was!! Later in our drive we saw another owl, also perched on a fence post, and we felt more confident with the ID after seeing the first one. We also saw a very large brownish-red and white hawk perched on a power line running along the roadside. We slowed to get a better look and just as we got close we were treated to watching the huge bird take off and fly across a field. It was a spectacular sight!

the lack of fences in part of the grasslands make it easier to imagine how this area looked in days gone by

Another thing we saw plenty of, as we do year round, were cattle. Ranchers lease the grazing rights, and many of the areas in the grasslands are open range. Yesterday we encountered this pair standing in the middle of the road. They didn't seem motivated to move when we pulled up, so after a few minutes I pulled out the camera, stuck it out the window and took a picture. To our astonishment, that action got 'em moving. Yeah!

And now, the flower pictures. As I mentioned earlier, the prickly pear (also known as the desert rose) were covered in blooms, but there were plenty of other flowers blooming as well.

prickly pear flower, just about to open

prickly pear flowers have a "waxy" look to them, and the insides powdery with pollen

this flower has red stamen filaments

while the ones on these are yellow

what beautiful shades of peachy-pink

the flowers bloom atop the cactus leaves, and a new leaf is growing out of the right side


here is a leaf bud

leaf bud close-up, with fly

The vast majority of the prickly pear flowers in the parts of the Pawnee we drove through were yellow or peachy pink, but Joe spotted a patch of pink as we were driving through a rather large meadow, so we stopped to investigate.


so glad we stopped, closer inspection revealed a small stand of pink prickly pear blooms

Here is a flower that I would yank immediately if I were to see it sprouting in my yard, long before it had a chance to bloom: weed! These flowers develop into big puff ball seed heads and are very invasive. This one though, growing along the roadside, projected a beauty I rarely appreciate. And, as Joe pointed out, such plants are most likely introduced to the environment via the road...

Here is one of the few Rocky Mountain Bee flowers we saw in bloom, most were still budding out and look as if they will be opening up in a few days:

with 2 ants, busily gathering pollen

And now, to one of my favorites: the thistles. Another invasive species that I would not want to live around, despite their beauty. Big ol' thorns, and the purple flowered Canada thistle is considered an noxious weed that is illegal to grow in Colorado. Not that there aren't plenty of them around Loveland, but there is also plenty of reason to strive for eradication. Not sure what variety of thistle this is, but there are lots and lots of them blooming in the Pawnee at the moment.

thistle flower bud

just starting to open up

a little further along...

what a spectacularly beautiful flower, so geometric

I believe this one is just about done blooming

We also saw a few of this type of thistle blooming, but most of this type were still covered in buds

notice the flower buds covered in stickers, which are also distributed along the leaf edges and along the stalks: a mean plant...

...with such beautiful flowers, the petals look as if they are made of tissue paper

We had a great time on our drive through the western section of the Pawnee National Grasslands. June brings unbelievable beauty to the short grass prairie, and I hope you have enjoyed my attempts to convey a bit of this spectacular and special part of the world.

Blow Darts

My father has an extreme interest in politics. He voraciously consumes facts from the news, in his case newspapers and TV, then he seems to spend hours thinking and analyzing what he's heard and learned. The result of all this is a head full of insight and conclusions--which he is then anxious to share, debate, whatever, with others.

And his interests are not limited to current politics, or even local politics. As a self-described "European History Major" who lived in Germany for 35 years, he has a healthy interest in both the Bavarian political scene and historical European political situations from roughly 1900-1935. Then there is the fact that he spent a career teaching US History to high school students, his focus undoubtedly related to the political influences, if at all possible.

As I see it, my father, a professed minimalist in the physical world, is very much a collector in a virtual sense: a collector of facts and theories, with a mind that is crammed full of them. Like many collectors, he derives pleasure from his collection when he browses through it or spends time in organizing the various components and their relationships. Not so very different in my mind from a collector of just about anything else, except of course that his collecting isn't obvious in the physical sense.

Not surprisingly, my father can talk and speculate endlessly about politics. Mostly, it is what he talks about. Also not surprisingly, he can be hands-down fascinating to listen to, as are many people who have a firm grip on the subject of which they speak. One can learn a tremendous amount from just listening to him, and he can move the conversation along without any assistance or questioning, meaning on a good day his monologues can run for hours. Depending on one's mood and the subject, the conversation can also seem endless.

My mother, who had a wide range of passionate interests of her own, was a collector in both the physical and virtual worlds. Inheriting her physical collections and then going through them in the year and a half since her death has given me quite a bit of insight into what she thought and collected in her head, because she wrote some (much?) of it down. And kept some (much?) of these notations, which of course had to be sorted through.

It amounted to mountains and mountains of paper scraps, notebooks, clippings, boxes of folders and files...some of it organized, some not. Much of it was packed in boxes in the garage, untouched for at least the 13 years since their last move, some of it much longer. My mother was a list keeper, things like books she'd read, books she wanted to read, things she wanted to do, places she wanted to go, ideas for things she wanted to make. Then there were the lists and compilations of things like the name for different animal young, varieties of apples, different kinds of breads made from a sponge, and the titles in chronological order of all the Tintin books. (Keep in mind, her habits predate being able to Google everything). She left piles of notebooks full of menu plans--most with comments entered after the meals had been cooked and eaten. She filled stacks of notebooks with ideas for combining different clothing items into outfits, using both separates she already had and ones she planned to make or acquire. And then there were the notebooks full of mathematical formulas and geometric scribblings, which are completely greek to me. But together, they all point to a woman who had a very wide range of interests and things on her mind.

Unfortunately perhaps, politics was not among my mother's very wide range of interests, or at least she seemed no more interested than the average person who follows the news and votes. And so, enter a little conflict into what always seemed a relatively happy and contented relationship between my parents. They worked it out over their 57 years together, but of course there was the eye-rolling and the outbursts of "Enough! I can't take it any more!" on occasion from my mother when she had reached her melting point for politics.

Several years ago we played this video for my mother, and she found it hilarious. She could relate!

It wasn't long before she was joking about finding a blow gun.

And amazingly, just a short time later, what did we come across in our garage saleing? A blow gun at a very reasonable price! We were of course, delighted by the find and wasted no time in presenting it to my mother, who was equally thrilled with the gift. The gun came with a dart, so we loaded it in the gun and had her try it out. She puffed into the mouthpiece and the dart shot across the room and drove itself into the molding around a closet door. Wow! Much hilarity ensued. And, after acquiring the blowgun and darts, which she kept on a table in the living room, discreetly tucked behind a large coleus plant, all she needed to do to register her waning interest in a long political monologue was mention needing to find some curare somewhere...soon...

I don't think my father was aware of any of this, if he was, he showed no indication. Curare, blow darts--he just ignored the whole spectre of the joke. But it sure provided the rest of us with plenty of lightened moments!

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The blow gun is now part of our permanent collection. Joe devised a way to hang it on the wall using the handles from a couple of my mother's cooking pots that went to aluminium recycling. It hangs in the living room.

waiting for curare